I really can't help but wonder what's going to happen to Pinterest, especially when the announcement comes after the release over the week-end that pinterest was now the 3rd most viewed social website !
[Reproduced from the New York Times] Facebook Buys Instagram for $1 Billion BY EVELYN M. RUSLI Facebook is not waiting for its initial public offering to make its first big purchase. The social network has acquired Instagram, the popular photo-sharing application, for about $1 billion in cash and stock, the company said Monday. In a Facebook post on a profile page, the company’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, said he planned to build Instagram independently from the social network. The move will allow users to post on other social networks, follow users not on Facebook, and to opt out of sharing on Facebook. “For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. “Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.” In recent years, Facebook has made several acquisitions; however it has mainly aimed at smaller companies of less than $100 million. Here is the news release from Facebook:
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In early 2007, I went to Waterloo with my boss and pitched an early version of Tegra. Met at the time the VP of Product Management at RIM, who told us that Blackberry users had no interest in multimedia and (verbatim) "blackberry will always be the ultimate email machine". Earlier that year I was in Espoo with the N=company showing them an iPhone-like, touch-screen based prototype. I was told, by a hot shot VP that "phones will never have a touch screen interface".
Lack of vision or corporate astigmatism or both ? I agree with Forbes, to me the A company is already in trouble. I already see unusualdesign mistakes (the apple tv front screen and the iphone lock screen camera soft button). And this comes from incredibly loyal A-fan. Bye Bye BlackBerry. How Long Will Apple Last? Just five years ago, “BlackBerry” was virtually synonymous with “smartphones.” It was well on its way to becoming a generic trademark, like Kleenex or Band-Aid, that would seemingly forever be associated with its entire sector. “For many, the Blackberry is a must-have gadget, a wireless hand-held computer that can send e-mail and make phone calls,” noted a 2005 NPR story on the “CrackBerry,” as some BlackBerry addicts referred to the device. (Incidentally, the story compared the BlackBerry to the Palm Treo, an equally popular device at the time.) Today, however, Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM), the maker of BlackBerry smartphones, is a financial basket case that has come to symbolize just how turbulent life in the modern digital economy can be. On Thursday, RIM announced that it was laying off top execs as revenues continued to plummet and the firm’s stock price hit its lowest mark since 2003. Industry analysts are lowering their projections for the firm and wondering if any corporate suitor—Microsoft is commonly mentioned—might be willing to step in and save the day by taking over the company. As a New York Times headline from earlier this year noted, “The BlackBerry [is] Trying to Avoid the Hall of Fallen Giants,” joining the infamous ranks of the Sony Walkman, the Palm Pilot, the Atari 2600 gaming console, and the Polaroid instant camera. The article noted that “Over the last year, RIM’s share price has plunged 75 percent. The company once commanded more than half of the American smartphone market. Today it has 10 percent.” Both metrics continue their downhill slide. If RIM can’t pull a rabbit out of the hat, the BlackBerry will become the latest case study exemplifying just how fast “information empires” can rise and fall in today’s rapidly evolving information technology marketplace. I’ve devoted numerous installments of this column to documenting how Joseph Schumpeter’s “perennial gales of creative destruction” are blowing harder than ever in today’s tech economy and laying waste to those who don’t innovate fast enough. |
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